Training to hate proceeded along conventional lines: demonize and dehumanize. The Germans were cruel, barbaric, robotic monsters of war. Sadists by nature and preference. Even so, the Japanese were far, far worse. Not even human. Not really.
Racism became a weapon of mass destruction, at least in the Pacific. Allied propaganda variously characterized the Japanese as angry sheep, rats, mad dogs, rattlesnakes, lice, ants or cockroaches stirred from their nests, wildcats, terrified cattle, and jackals.
...
The subhuman Japanese, so visibly different, might invite extermination. But the average G.I. — so polls would show — felt little deep hatred for the German soldier during the war.
After, when news of the death camps became commonly known, a permanent stink attached to Germany, a country that could allow such a thing. Who were these monsters? Even so, complicit civilians and their political masters smelled far worse than the common soldier, whose reputation for blind obedience and competence preceded him. When the German soldier took cover behind the stock excuse, "I was just following orders," it actually sounded plausible. Von Clausewitz and Bismarck had shaped a German military that was the envy of the ruthless: they got results on the battlefield. If you had the ends, they had the means.
Not everyone was fooled. LIFE photographer Robert Capa thought they were nasty whiner-schnitzels: "The Germans are the meanest bastards. They are the meanest during an operation, and afterward they all have a cousin in Philadelphia." After you've captured them. "That is what I like about the French. They do not have cousins in Philadelphia."
Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."